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| by kenn on 11/26/2003 11:26:00 PM |
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His Zenith
 Tupac Shakur was shot to death in 1996, but it didn't much hurt his career: he is revered now more than ever, lionized in the new documentary "Resurrection." The Notorious B.I.G. was killed in 1997, but no hip-hop club night or radio show is complete without one of his songs. And 50 Cent reminds everyone how he cheated death: an assassination attempt left him with an appealingly slurred voice and a great back story.
Compared with hip-hop heroes like these, Jay-Z has a significant handicap: he's alive and well. He is also one of the shrewdest rappers of all time and one of the most creative, so he found a clever way to overcome this liability: he decided to stage his own death, or at least disappearance.
Jay-Z has been threatening to retire for years, and this month he released "The Black Album" (Roc-A-Fella/Island Def Jam) as his last will and testament, or so he claims. And at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday night he said goodbye with an extraordinary concert that was both moving and festive: a memorial service disguised as a block party.
Jay-Z's rapping served as a homily, which was interrupted by secular (and often sexual) hymns from R. Kelly and Mary J. Blige, as well as Beyoncé, whose relationship with Jay-Z seems to go well beyond duets. Each of the three performed a brief set, but the wound-up crowd was really satisfied only when Jay-Z was onstage.
He did some songs with a sharp backing band (anchored by the Roots' drummer Questlove) and others with a D.J. Either way, Jay-Z's delivery was typically sharp, and except for one glitch (the speakers cut out for most of "Frontin'," a duet with Pharrell Williams from the Neptunes), this was about as smooth and as strong a hip-hop concert as anyone has ever managed.
The party started with a Garden-variety tribute: a basketball jersey bearing Jay-Z's number (1 of course) was raised to the rafters. And then, for more than two and a half hours, Jay-Z delivered his own homily, ripping through dozens of tracks from his relatively brief but astonishingly productive career.
In verses from his first album, "Reasonable Doubt," from 1996, Jay-Z came across as a jaded hustler, world-weary from the start. During "Dead Presidents II," he vowed to avenge a friend's death, clear-eyed and unapologetic: "Murder is a tough thing to digest/It's a slow process/And I ain't got nothing but time."
Much of Jay-Z's music has been tinged with nostalgia for these early years. And in "Hovi Baby," from last year, he delivered a couplet that sounded like an epitaph: "Seven straight summers, critics might not admit it/But nobody in rap did it quite like I did it."
"The Black Album" was meant to be a career capstone, but it's a disappointment: a bit short on wit and agility and a bit long on solemnity and speechifying. Still, the new songs sounded great on Tuesday, in part because they were interspersed with more buoyant singles from previous albums. One of the best "Black Album" tracks is "Dirt Off Your Shoulder," with a synthetic beat by Timbaland that seems to play backward. He allowed himself a smile as he rhymed, "You gotta pardon Jay/For selling out the Garden in a day."
Nearly every rap concert these days includes a tribute to the dead: not just Shakur and B.I.G. but Jam Master Jay, Lisa Lopes, Big Pun, Aaliyah and others. Jay-Z went one step further, bringing out Tupac's mother, Afeni Shakur, and B.I.G.'s mother, Voletta Wallace, both of whom were presented with checks for the foundations that they run in memory of their sons.
But the night ended with the loved one all alone, performing "December 4th," which lays out a mythified version of his life, from birth to drug-dealing to rapping. The song — and the concert — finished with a defiant (but also beseeching) final couplet: "If you can't respect that, your whole perspective is wack/Maybe you'll love me when I fade to black."
With that, the stage darkened and Jay-Z disappeared; as exhausted fans filed out, some of them seemed as if they missed their hero already. Jay-Z should enjoy his retirement; he's certainly earned it. He claims to be "in heavy, heavy negotiations" to move the New Jersey Nets to Brooklyn. But let's hope basketball doesn't monopolize too much of his afterlife. After all, he has a resurrection to plan.
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